Sunday, February 21, 2016

Staunton, February 22 – Commenting
on a new study by the Pushkin Institute of Russian language knowledge by
officials at various levels, Marina Koroleva says that the greatest threat to
the national language is not foreign borrowings, jargon or curse words but
rather the spread of chancellery language throughout the population.

The
journalist says that officialese is an illness like diphtheria, is spread “from
bearer to bearer, is very infectious, and extraordinarily vigorous. Times
change” as they have since the Soviet period, but this plague continues to
affect people with “only small mutations.” It seriously threatens Russian (rg.ru/2016/02/15/opublikovan-rejting-gramotnosti-rossijskih-chinovnikov.html).

“Of course,” she continues, “the
speech of the present-day bureaucrat is not a copy of the speech of the Soviet
bureaucrat. The words he employs are to a large extent different. Besides, the
bureaucrat of Soviet times in generally never broke away from the printed
page.” His speeches were the same as his writings.

But if current officials are more used
to speaking, they nonetheless have not managed to avoid many of the phrases and
hence habits of mind of their predecessors.And consequently, Koroleva says, Russians need to be vaccinated against
it not just when they reach school but as soon as they enter kindergarten.

The journalist’s comments came in
reaction to a report by Moscow’s Pushkin Institute that studied remarks by
officials on Russian television and evaluated the level of grammar and usage displayed
by federal ministers, Duma deputies, heads of regions, and heads of
municipalities.

Rating the members of these groups
by the number of errors per minute of air time, the Institute’s experts found
that federal ministers used Russian the most correctly, followed by Duma
deputies and mayors (in a near tie), with heads of federal subjects in last
place by a wide margin.

While the overall level of literacy
was high, the Institute suggested, there were many mistakes with ministers often
misusing verbs, deputies putting stress on the wrong syllable or misusing words
of all kinds, and mayors and governors often making all these mistakes and more
besides.

Because of this, the Pushkin
Institute recommended that “officials when preparing a public speech do not
forget to look at the dictionary and then after the speech to find time to
analyze it in order to avoid typical mistakes in the future.”